Susan Toft founded Laundry Lady in 2012 so that she could leave behind her corporate career and work from home to spend more time with her young kids.
Her goal was to create a business where she would never miss her son’s sports day, while helping families find the end of their laundry basket. The Laundry Lady now supports other women and men to do the same by employing a team of independent contractors who work from their own homes. Their mission is to deliver timely and quality laundry services at the click of a button through their flexible work at home network of Laundry Ladies and Lads.
“I was a new mom and I wanted to find something that I could do from home, work around my kids, and have the flexibility that I just couldn’t get in the workplace.”
Susan likens the business to Uber for laundry. A team of independent contractors, who all work from their own homes, pick up the laundry, wash or iron it, and return it to the customer. In the beginning, Susan washed and ironed all the laundry herself. To expand her business, she began to seek out people who wanted the flexible lifestyle and hired them as contractors to scale the workload.
“We’re really passionate about looking for people who really value time and flexibility because that’s what it was born out of. A lot of our contractors are moms or husband and wife teams who want to earn income.”
As Susan’s business grew, so did the need for more contractors. This growth proved to be a time-consuming process, and more often than not, candidates weren’t showing up for interviews. Susan needed an effective way to identify and qualify hirable candidates who were aligned with the mission and values of her growing company.
Her recruitment process revolves around email. Each time a prospective candidate filled out a form on the Laundry Lady website, Susan received an email with the submitted information. She would then manually review the information, consider whether they were a good fit, and email the prospective candidate to schedule an interview.
This process wasn’t scaling as the number of prospective candidate applicants grew. The majority of Susan’s time was spent entering data in Excel, sending emails, and manually keeping track of each candidate’s status in the recruitment process. At the end of the day, she didn’t have a clear picture of candidate viability or how close she was to reaching her hiring goals. Only 10% of the candidates she emailed were showing up for interviews. Susan needed a better way to engage with her candidates, while managing the recruitment process end to end.
Solving Scalability
As Susan began researching technology solutions, she found that traditional recruitment systems were too expensive and didn’t fit the Laundry Lady recruitment model. Susan knew she needed to automate her recruitment process, but her needs were more custom than what traditional off-the-shelf systems could provide her business. She needed a customizable solution that fit within her budget.
When she discovered ActiveCampaign, she fell in love with its flexibility. She was able to build a process that combined automation with a human touch, tailored exactly to her business needs.
Using ActiveCampaign and the power of Customer Experience Automation (CXA), Susan created a form for prospective contractors to submit the necessary information. Then, this information is funneled into ActiveCampaign’s pipeline based CRM for Susan to review. The candidate is automatically entered into an automation that sends a series of emails sharing more about the role and linking to informational videos.
Susan is now able to easily keep track of each candidate’s progress through the recruitment flow and understand how engaged they are, including which videos they’ve watched and which links they’ve clicked.
Once a candidate is hired, they are entered into a separate onboarding flow. This automation enables Susan to easily manage paperwork and training materials and quickly get new contractors out into the field.
“It’s been really great because we are able to build automations in ActiveCampaign that align with our candidate journey. At each step, we are encouraging them to join the team, or come to an interview, or reminding them to send us all their paperwork.”
Seeing growth with a personal touch
Susan’s new pipeline workflow has resulted in a higher calibre of candidates, and less time mired in tedious manual processes. Today, Susan has 90% of her candidates showing up for their interviews, up from just 10% previously. Her team of contractors has grown 5x over the past year, and she is on her way to tripling the number of contractors in the next 12 months!
“We needed a system to help us scale. I came to ActiveCampaign because I can basically build everything that I wanted to do, customized around what our needs are. I don’t think that any of the off-the-shelf recruitment systems could have resulted at the scale that ActiveCampaign has been able to for us.”
Not only is Laundry Lady growing, but they are continuing to fulfill their overall mission to help other men and women in finding work they can do from home and find more time for family.
Discover more about how CXA can help you achieve your business goals by trying ActiveCampaign for free.
